Culture, Identity & Society

A 22-country experiment expected the pull to copy other people to vary with culture. It found little evidence that it does.

On porch chairs, neighborhood regulars, and the curious social life of doing very little.

Every October, the same quiet chemistry turns hillsides from green to gold to scarlet. Scientists know exactly how it works - and why no two autumns are alike.

The Sun is in the most active phase of its 11-year cycle, and it is pushing auroras into skies that almost never see them. The show is not over yet.

A sample can be shorter than a heartbeat and still involve two copyrights. Here is how U.S. law treats sampling, and where federal courts disagree.

A unified movement for solidarity, cultural reclamation, and the global empowerment of the African diaspora.

The Cornell allegations and the Exonerated Five are different cases. Together, they test whether public urgency, institutional scrutiny, and procedural restraint are applied consistently.

On Oct. 8, rallies in more than 40 states turned an anonymous lawsuit against Cornell into a public demand that survivors be heard and protected.

Adidas's new case against White Fox shows why fashion trademark disputes turn on consumer perception, not simple arithmetic.

New York’s new Met Opera lottery could remove one barrier to the arts. Its larger test is whether first-time audiences hear about it and can make the trip.

Algae and phytoplankton are easy to overlook, but they anchor marine food webs, shape the carbon cycle and account for a major share of Earth’s oxygen production.

The tournament made equal prize money a Grand Slam standard. Its record 2026 purse shows real progress and the limits of measuring equality only at the finish line.

The Venice Film Festival opened with red-carpet glamour, a film about tabloid power and a blunt argument over who the industry still permits to make high art.

Mariya Kirichok connects J.R.R. Tolkien’s biography, faith, war experience, and love of nature to the enduring themes of Middle-earth.

Dumplings do not tell one simple story of origin. Mariya Kirichok traces the mix of cultural exchange and independent invention behind filled-dough traditions around the world.

In Amsterdam, an uncertain search for salt becomes Shreya Dharavath’s case for moving through unfamiliar places with curiosity, humility, and room for connection.

Forty-nine years after Elvis Presley’s death, his image still reveals how celebrity, commerce and cultural memory reinforce one another.

From Spider-Man to MAGA, Sangwoo Cho examines why promises of restoration have become so persuasive across American culture and politics.

Inside Barcelona's Palau de la Música Catalana, architecture, patronage and Catalan identity meet beneath a stained-glass sun.

Mingei celebrated anonymous everyday craft. Its success in museums and markets forced the movement to confront the institutions it once questioned.

A delivery rider’s poetry joins a larger tradition of working-class writers turning labor, exhaustion, and survival into art.

The 250-year anniversary of the Declaration’s signing reveals how America turned a messy political sequence into one clean national myth.

Formula 1’s calendar is a business portfolio shaped by market strategy, public funding, heritage, and the scarcity of coveted grid slots.

A disputed World Cup suspension became a test of how FIFA protects the appearance and reality of independence when political power seeks access.

The decade’s biggest nostalgia trend is less about flower crowns and more about longing for a social internet that felt spontaneous, shared and human.

The Soviet Union promised equality among its republics, but repression, deportation, and Russification left political and cultural scars that still shape the region.

Two decades after Jon Stewart confronted Crossfire, political commentary has moved online, but its incentives still reward performance, outrage, and partisan theater.

India’s Cockroach Janta Party turned an insult against unemployed youth into a national movement demanding accountability for an examination system in crisis.

The last two weeks in the United States have seen nationwide protests against ICE, Donald Trump, and the actions of the DOJ within the last year. In those two weeks, students took to the streets in droves, participating in school walkouts, chanting, and claiming intersections and/or sidewalks in massive crowds. Although some in more organized manners than others, students have provided the bulk and blade of anti-ICE attention & action as of late. Local partisan groups have the choice to...

Look at the roster of the French national team. Then look at the history of French colonialism in West and North Africa. The connection between those two things is not coincidental. It is the entire story. France's ability to field one of the most competitive squads in the world in 2026 is inseparable from the migration patterns set in motion by its imperial history, the communities that formed in its cities as a result, and the young men who grew up in those communities dreaming of...

The United States turns 250 years old this week. The NPR/PBS News/Marist poll released July 1, 2026 asked Americans how they feel about that milestone. The results do not describe a nation in the mood for celebration. They describe a nation that is exhausted, divided, and deeply uncertain about whether the system it inherited is capable of delivering on what it promised. The poll is worth sitting with. Not because any single survey can capture the full complexity of what 330 million people...

We are raised to not think outside ourselves, to ignore the unhoused person asking for food, to avert our eyes at the sight of struggling families desperate for medical care. The United States and similar capitalist Western cultures have cultivated a mindset of “not owing anyone anything” and of watching out for yourself above all else. This seems to remain true in closer-knit groups like family and friends as well as in larger community bodies. We have created a culture where support and...

Everything you see can now be yours with the click of a button: every new shirt scrolled past on Instagram, every new food trend on TikTok. Social media and online shopping have built an algorithm of wanting, and the fastest possible way to satisfy it. Online shopping platforms push products toward consumers with little acknowledgment of the environmental cost on either side of the transaction. As with most technological advances, the focus stays on human convenience, not on what those...

From the earliest traces of humanity, our existence has been accompanied by creation: sculptures, paintings on cave walls, music, and stories. Art has been found on every continent with early human inhabitants, across nearly every style and medium imaginable. Yet humanity is often defined by its more practical inventions, as the agriculturists and the toolmakers. What about the artists? Storytellers Even before the invention of written language, humans were storytellers. Cave paintings were...

Mullets, red hats, and American flag apparel have become shorthand for the American South in the popular imagination. Southern culture is too often portrayed as synonymous with cruelty and bigotry. Popular media tends to depict the region as impoverished and uneducated, classist stereotypes that go largely unchallenged because the South is also framed as cruel and therefore undeserving of the compassion typically extended to struggling communities. Southern Roots That image obscures a more...

Legacy admissions have become one of the most quietly debated features of American higher education. The conversation tends to flare up around Supreme Court decisions and admissions scandals, then fade. But the policy is still very much alive, and the students it displaces are real. The Where Legacy admissions exist in all states except California, Illinois, Maryland, Colorado, and Virginia. California and Maryland have enacted statewide bans covering both public and private universities,...

In an era of "uncs," "bums," and "goons," one term circulating among American teenagers stands out for its deeply political, and largely unknown, origin: "chud." The word began its life as the title of a 1984 horror film, "C.H.U.D.," an acronym for "Cannibalistic Humanoid Underground Dwellers." From there, it was adopted by left-wing communities on 4chan as a derogatory label for right-wing individuals, before migrating into mainstream social media as a broader insult directed at anyone...

In June 2026, the same companies that just a few years ago were racing to add rainbows to their logos and drive floats through pride parades have gone quiet. No profile picture changes. No statements. No floats. The silence is not neutral. Corporate Pride People inside queer communities saw this coming. For years, the criticism of corporate pride sponsorship was consistent: the attraction to queer aesthetics felt transactional, a cash grab by companies that did little to materially support...

The Trump administration cut 1.1 billion dollars in federal funding from public broadcasting this year. NPR stations across the country are contracting or closing. PBS faces a similar reckoning. Voice of America, Radio Free Europe, Radio Free Asia, and several other public-interest broadcasters have had their funding slashed or eliminated entirely. The justification offered by administration officials is that the government should not be in the business of funding media. That argument has a...

On January 1, 2026, Zohran Mamdani was sworn in as mayor of New York City. He is the first Muslim to hold that office. He is the first Asian American to hold that office. He is also a democratic socialist who represents a district in Queens and who ran on a platform that most political analysts, as recently as three years ago, would have described as unelectable in a major American city. The significance of this moment does not reduce to identity, though identity matters. The first Muslim,...

Livestreams depict young men sitting in fancy cars and standing in bustling clubs, smiling awkwardly while steroids course through their bodies. If you turned the lights on, you would see red marks on their cheeks and jaws from hammers, the stubble barely starting to fill out their young faces. "Looksmaxxing" has entered the public zeitgeist as the newest form of self-improvement. Young men take extreme measures to increase their attractiveness, often pursuing dangerous practices with little...

Teen Vogue dissolved its politics team in November 2025, one day before a major election. The timing was not accidental. It was a statement, whether Conde Nast intended it to be or not, about which kinds of coverage are considered expendable when the business pressure is high enough. Teen Vogue was not just another youth publication. It was, for about a decade, one of the most consistently serious outlets in American media. It commissioned incarcerated writers. It published grassroots...

A protester in Kansas City marches with students from Crossroads Preparatory Academy in 2022. On Thursday, City Council repealed a ban on so-called conversion therapy, a scientifically discredited practice that seeks to “convert” LGBTQ+ minors to a heterosexual lifestyle. On March 31, 2026, the Supreme Court ruled 8 to 1 that Colorado's ban on conversion therapy for LGBTQ+ minors violated the First Amendment. Justice Neil Gorsuch wrote the majority opinion. Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson was...

Graduating undergraduate students are terrified of the labor market they are about to enter. They fear the impact that AI will have on virtually every field, especially in the humanities and creative work. Despite the volume of student concern about the replacement of human talent, a significant number of high-profile educators and professionals remain either oblivious or indifferent to the alarm their pupils are raising. That disconnect came to an uncomfortable head this May. Graduations are...

Creatures of the night, stalking through stone-brick towns, clinging to trees, watching through windows. The story of the vampire is universal, shifting between different themes and appearances to adapt to each culture and era. "Vampire" is a broad term with only one true requirement: the consumption of blood. Other supernatural abilities usually accompany this trait, but they are negotiable. The blood never is. Early iterations of what we now call vampires appear across the world, though the...

Two people I knew in high school earned Associate's Degrees before they ever received their diplomas. Today, one is at UCLA and the other at UC Berkeley, each on track to graduate at least a year ahead of their classmates. Neither spent a dollar on most of their credits. Both were admitted as first-years. This path offers a cheaper, fast-track through college than AP tests. It gives you a significant and directly transferable credit boost while making your college application stand out. If...

Records are flying off the shelves at thrift stores. Printed polaroids are taped to bedroom walls. Zines line the aisles of local bookstores. Gen Z has developed a genuine appreciation for physical media, a sensibility that felt lost in the early days of the internet and digital downloads. The old desire for efficiency has been replaced with something different: a need for tangible, personal memory. Today's teenagers and young adults want something they can hold, not just scroll past. The New...

Public media is not just background noise. It is the news infrastructure that serves places no one else will.

It is not just an aesthetic. The cigarette is back as a prop, a statement, and a cultural signal, and the reasons why tell you something real about this moment.

The Trump administration opened a civil rights investigation into a private women's college for admitting trans women. Legal experts are baffled. The implications go far beyond one campus.